Submit disavow file or not?

so my site was spammed by a competitor when my site was ranking at around #15 spot. I did not submit disavow file at that time and kept on working to build quality links to it. Now site is ranked top 3 and only has high quality backlinks along with the spammy links built by the competitor.

I want to make this site a long term project, so should i submit a disavow file or not? Will that effect top rankings if i submit those links in disavow? or maybe i should submit 50% of the links in disavow file so google knows atleast i tried to remove those links, this way maybe they will not take any manual action on the site in future?

FYI spammy links are around 40000 total links according to ahrefs and 500-600 referring domains.

Thanks for the reply, but i dont want it to tank since this is a long term project not churn and burn. Even if i get from top 3 to top 10 i dont mind since inner page of site rank good as well. I was thinking of doing it to prevent any future actions.

Id have to say that if you are holding a high ranking just leave it for now. If you encounter some troubles which you could possibly attribute back to those spammy links then go for the disavow. Just keep an eye on your traffic and make sure you dont get any sort of penalisation messages in your Search Console.

I'd say it pretty much depends on your link profile. A small percentage of spammy links is completely natural. Furthermore, I'd better not touch it if you're ranking well at this point.

I personally never used that disavow tool, the one time I got negatively seo'ed with a bunch of exact match anchor texts I think I fixed it by lowering my onsite keyword density, but that was a while ago.

so my site was spammed by a competitor when my site was ranking at around #15 spot. I did not submit disavow file at that time and kept on working to build quality links to it. Now site is ranked top 3 and only has high quality backlinks along with the spammy links built by the competitor.

I want to make this site a long term project, so should i submit a disavow file or not? Will that effect top rankings if i submit those links in disavow? or maybe i should submit 50% of the links in disavow file so google knows atleast i tried to remove those links, this way maybe they will not take any manual action on the site in future?

FYI spammy links are around 40000 total links according to ahrefs and 500-600 referring domains.

any suggestions are welcome

thanks.

Click to expand...

I had to deal with a similar issue, a link seller's website was hacked generating around 20,000 links. It actually didn't hurt my ranking (from what I understand google now ignores such links) but to be on the safe side, I did disavow that domain because I don't want 20,000 links from one domain trigger some kind of manual review.

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